Did you know?

This is where i post interesting tidbits of information i find – usually on the interweb.

Big Bugs

i’ve been noticing for a couple of weeks around Haifa the corpses of some obscenely large bugs being happily devoured by other, much more appropriately sized, insects and birds.  Then, last night, i was enjoying the fresh evening breezes of my sun room and one of these outsized creatures had the audacity to land on the railing – a mere two feet away from my person.  In my horrified fascination, i determined to identify said beastie, but failed horribly.  i did, however, become interested to know what the biggest bug on the planet is-information i could process with measured objectivity to prepare myself should i ever encounter such a one.  And here it is:

Holy crap myself

Goliath beetles are largely accepted as the biggest bugs on the planet and are certainly the heaviest.  They are members of the insect family, called a scarab beetle.

This group of insects is a native species to Africa and are usually tropical.

The larvae need more protein than most beetle larvae and instead of being developed in decayed plant materials such as trees and dead wood they need a bit more of something like peat in which to lay their eggs.  These larvae grow so rapidly that they will grow to weigh more than 100 grams (almost 1/4 pound)  in about four months. They can grow up to five inches long in larval stages.

When the end of the wet season arrives in Africa, the larva is done growing.  It will burrow deep under the ground and make a cocoon of sorts which is a thin cell out of soil.  It will become an adult while the world above it enters the dry season.

Completely inactive for about three weeks, the larva will shrink and become very wrinkly, when it then sheds the skin and the teenage years, prepupal stage is entered.  During this time it becomes an adult through various changes.

In several months the adult will shed the kind and then open its wings (shudder) and fold them to a proper position on its body.  The beetle will then harden, to a shell called an exoskeleton, still underground.

When the wet season arrives again it will be awakened to emerge from its underground home when the water soaks down to soften the shell of its encasement.  He or she will then fly away in search of a potential mate and the entire cycle begins again.

Adult Goliath beetles will eat nearly any food that is high in sugar or glucose, particularly tree sap. They will also eat fruit, when it is very ripe.

Goliath beetles have a first pair of wings which are protective covers for their secondary pair of wings. Only the second pair of wings is actually used for flying.

Find out more about the Goliath Beetle over at Wikipedia »

I still don’t know what my own personal demon insect is, but i suspect it’s some sort of locusty grasshopper monster.  Although, i kinda think it had horns…

Info on the Goliath Beetle from:
http://www.itsnature.org/ground/creepy-crawlies-land/goliath-beetle/

Boys and Girls

Apparently…
Until eight weeks old, every fetal brain looks female – female is na-ture’s default gender setting. If you were to watch a female and a male brain developing via time-lapse photography, you would see their circuit diagrams being laid down according to the blueprint drafted by both genes and sex hormones. A huge testosterone surge beginning in the eighth week will turn this unisex brain male by killing off some cells in the communication centers and growing more cells in the sex and aggression centers. If the testosterone surge doesn’t happen, the female brain continues to grow unperturbed. The fetal girl’s brain cells sprout more connections in the communication centers and areas that process emotion. How does this fetal fork in the road affect us? For one thing, because of her larger communication center, this girl will grow up to be more talkative than her brother. Men use about seven thousand words per day. Women use about twenty thousand. For another, it defines our innate biological destiny, coloring the lens through which each of us views and engages the world.

According to this book The Female Brain by Dr. Louann Brizendine

I’m Not That Well-Read

This is a personal thing you might know that i actually found on the internet.  So it totally qualifies for this page.  Erin posted it on her blog and you know how i love to answer questions about myself.  So here you go.  Let it be known that just because i know how to read doesn’t mean i do it just ’cause i’m suposed to.  Here’s how it works:

Below is a list of books any responsible literature major has read and probably analyzed.
Books i have read are in bold.

Books i intend to read are italicized.
Books i LOVE are in bold and italicized.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austin
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible – God’s apostles (and others)
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. 1984- George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’ Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

That was fun.  Now Erin wants you to reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them.

Lag ba’Omer, a minor festival that falls on the 18th of Iyyar, is the 33rd day of the seven-week counting of the Omer which takes places between Passover and Shavuot (Lag is an acronym for the Hebrew letters lamed and gimmel, whose numerical equivalent is 33). On Lag ba’Omer the semi-mourning of the Omer period is lifted, and weddings, haircuts and celebrations are permitted.

The reason for the institution of Lag ba’Omer is found in an obscure Talmudic passage (Yevamot 62b), which describes a plague that killed 24,000 disciples of 1st cent. Rabbi Akiva during the Omer period; a complicated commentary on the passage suggests that the plague ceased at the middle of the counting period, hence the Scholars’ Festival on Lag Ba’Omer.

According to one more historical theory concerning the origins of the minor festival, the Jewish rebel Bar Kokhba may have secured a victory against the Romans on the 33rd day of the Counting, after a series of defeats. Roman rule made it necessary to hide the real reason for celebration and to attribute it other reasons (such as the reason mentioned above). Other scholars suggests that the taking up of arms at the outbreak of the first revolt against Rome took place on this date in 66 CE.

According to other traditions, the great Flood commenced on this date, and in the time of Moses, manna began to fall from heaven. A later tradition established La ba’Omer as the date of death R. Shimon bar Yohai (2nd cent., student of Rabbi Akiva), to whom the Zohar is attributed, and hence came to be celebrated in particular by the kabbalists. At Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai’s burial place, in Meron in the Galilee, mystics and Hasidim gather on Lag ba’Omer, giving their young sons their first haircuts, lighting bonfires, and dancing and singing through the night.

Lighting bonfires, a central form of celebrating this day in Israel among religious and non-religious Jews, is quite likely unrelated to Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai but rather based on an ancient, heathen, light-ceremonial. The custom of playing with bows in arrows on Lag ba’Omer may have originated in Europe, where children customarily played in the fields, reenacting the Jewish-Roman war.

From “Jewish Heritage Online Magazine“

Scabs

i fell down recently and skinned my knee – something i rarely did in childhood and haven’t done since. As a consequence, i’ve taken particular interest in the scab that formed on my knee and asked Google “what is a scab?” This is the best answer i got:

You’re running around with your friend, laughing your head off, when suddenly you trip over a rock and hit the ground (i was walking down the street and my foot went in a pothole. the result was the same). As you pick yourself up, you notice that your knee is bleeding. But while you’re trying to figure out where that rock(pothole) came from, the blood from the cut on your knee is already busy at work creating a scab.

As soon as you scrape or break the skin anywhere on your body, special blood cells called platelets (say: playt-lits) spring into action. Platelets stick together like glue at the cut, forming a clot. This clot is like a protective bandage over your cut that keeps more blood and other fluids from flowing out. The clot is also full of other blood cells and thread-like stuff called fibrin (say: fy-brin) that help hold the clot together.

So now you’re home, you’re cleaned up, and you’re not bleeding anymore. But things are still happening on your knee. As the clot starts to get hard and dries out, a scab forms. Scabs are usually crusty and dark red or brown. Their job is to protect the cut by keeping germs and other stuff out and giving the skin cells underneath a chance to heal.

If you look at a scab, it probably just looks like a hard, reddish glob. But under its surface, all kinds of things are going on. New skin cells are being made to help repair the torn skin. Damaged blood vessels are being fixed.

White blood cells, the kind that fight infection to keep you from getting sick, go to work by attacking any germs that may have gotten into the cut. White blood cells also get rid of any dead blood and skin cells that may still be hanging around the cut. By the time it’s all done, a new layer of skin will have been made. (Does anyone know whether puss might be made up of white blood cells?)

Eventually, a scab falls off and reveals new skin underneath (This is starting to happen to me now). This usually happens by itself after a week or two. Even though it may be tough not to pick at a scab (really tough), try to leave it alone. If you pick or pull at the scab, you can undo the repair and rip your skin again, which means it’ll probably take longer to heal. You may even get a scar. So let that scab sit there — your skin will thank you!

Other clear and simple explanations for various bodily functions can be found here http://kidshealth.org/kid/ in both English and Spanish.

Caffeine

While coffee and tea are both sources of caffeine, the amounts of caffeine in any single serving of these beverages varies significantly. An average serving of coffee contains the most caffeine, yet the same serving size of tea provides only 1/2 to 1/3 as much.(Ref.: Caffeine by The Institute of Food Technologists’ Expert Panel on Food Safety & Nutrition.) One of the more confusing aspects of caffeine content is the fact that coffee contains less caffeine than tea when measured in its dry form. The caffeine content of a prepared cup of coffee is significantly higher than the caffeine content of a prepared cup of tea.

Caffeine Content Comparisons
The following is the approximate caffeine content of various beverages	Milligrams of Caffeine
Item	Average per serving	Range	Per ounce*
Coffee (5 oz. cup)	80	40 – 170	16.00
Cola (12 oz. can)	45	30 – 60	3.75
Black Tea (one tea bag)	40	25 – 110	5.00
Oolong Tea (one tea bag)	30	12 – 55	3.75
Green Tea (one tea bag)	20	8 – 30	2.50
White Tea (one tea bag)	15	6 – 25	2.00
Decaf Tea (one tea bag)	2	1 – 4	0.50
Herbal Tea (one tea bag)	0	0	0.00
*Assumes 8 ounces of water per tea bag

Courtesy of http://www.stashtea.com/caffeine.htm via John Amir Abbassi

Killer Bees

Although a handful of Asian giant hornets can easily defeat the defenses of many individual honey bees, whose small stings cannot inflict much damage against such a large predator, the Japanese honey bee (Apis cerana japonica) has evolved a collective defence.

When a hornet scout locates and approaches a Japanese honey bee hive it will emit specific pheromonal hunting signals. When the honey bees detect these pheromones, a hundred or so will gather near the entrance of the nest and keep it open, apparently to draw the hornet further into the hive or allow it to enter on its own. As the hornet enters the nest, a large mob of about five hundred honey bees surrounds it, completely covering it and preventing it from moving, and begin quickly vibrating their flight muscles. This has the effect of raising the temperature of the honey bee mass to 47 °C (117 °F). The honey bees can just tolerate this temperature, but the hornets cannot survive more than 45 °C (113 °F), and die. Often several bees perish along with the intruder, but the death of the hornet scout prevents it from bringing reinforcements which could wipe out the colony.

Wow. From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_giant_hornet